Reason Rally: Veni, Vidi, Vici

Below is a brief recap for those that missed the event and a reminder for those that did attend as to why we were there in the first place.

If you weren’t there, what did you miss?

In a word, everything! The reason Rally was the largest non-theistic convention ever. Never before have so many people and so many diverse groups within the freethought community come together for a single event. Officially there were just over 20,000 people – give or take, according to the National Parks facility people. Make that, just over 20,000 people on our feet for ten hours in the rain! We also all came together as atheists.

What did we see?

Leaders from all of the sponsoring organizations like David Silverman, Dan Barker, and Ron Lindsay
Comedians from Jamie Kilstein (I’m still sore from laughing) to Tim Minchin
Musicians like Bad Religion, Tim Minchin, Shelly Segal, and Andy Shernoff
Advocate Scientists like Richard Dawkins, PZ Meyers, and Lawrence Krauss
Celebrities like Bill Maher and Penn Jillette (via recorded video) and Adam Savage
Real life activist heroes like Jessica Ahlquist
and much more

Why?

To show our representatives in Washington, and the world for that matter, that we exist. We exist and we vote. Even in the rain, we stayed. We expressed our convictions and concerns. We also came together as a unified community. We put to bed that asinine saying that, “Getting non-believers together is like herding cats.” FFRF with AA with AHA with CFI, oh my! Everyone put aside personal differences and bad histories and came together for reason, logic and a god-free lifestyle.

For those of us there, it was a profound emotional experience that none of us will ever forget. In the next few weeks there will be much commentary, blogs, reports, YouTube posts and more. Check it out and see what you missed. Whether you went or not, buy the video. It will help support the event which was funded by the organizations themselves along with a matching donation from Todd Stiefel (we love you Todd!).

What’s next?

Time to kick ass. Everyone left motivated and pumped. We need to take that energy and translate it to action. The American Atheists “Come Out” campaign is all about atheists coming out. There has never been a better time. We have the numbers and the abilities to influence public policy on all levels. We need to do that. We need to run for all public offices. Atheists need to be on local school boards, and in state assemblies. We can no longer sit on the sidelines while our country goes to hell (excuse the religious pun). The religious right has been infiltrating our government since they came to power in the early 1980’s. It’s time to take back our country and restore “real” American values of moral decency. As Penn Jillette so very eloquently expressed, “We are the just and moral ones. We must take the high moral ground and force the religious to rise to our level.”

What did you do this past weekend? Me, I can to Washington DC, I saw the largest gathering of rational people in history, and I participated in the event that will go down in history and the beginning of the new enlightenment for the United States. I came, I saw, I conquered.